Finances, organization, and priorities are simply a necessity in life. Without them, it’s impossible for society to function because work will never get done and the most important tasks will never get tackled. This is especially true in business. Some of the things a business has to think about:

• Cash Flow: A business either needs to be making more than it takes in or have enough cash flow to sustain itself until it has achieved profitability (burn rate).
• Functionality: A business’s products must be in demand. It has to be useful, entertaining, or in some way valuable to the consumer. Otherwise, the business dies.
• Organization: Businesses, from one-man operations to conglomerates, must keep personnel, finances, taxes, and information organized and readily accessible if it hopes to succeed.
• Competition: If an industry is profitable, a business can expect stiff and smart competition that will challenge it for customers.
• Prioritization: A business must know what projects are the most important and set everything else aside. Getting 80% of things 80% done is far worse than getting 30% of priorities 100% done.

Each and every one of these qualities and realms are important to a business. None can be ignored for a business to success. None of these qualities can be ignored for an individual to succeed.

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During the Dot Com Bubble, the most popular business model was spend like hell to drive growth and buy million dollar Super Bowl ads. The focus was not on business models. After the rash, we endured a lull. But now, a new breed of Internet company exploded onto the scene, a movement most know as Web 2.0 (more accurately, social media).

Although accelerated growth still remains the dominant goal of most Internet startups, they have avoided many of the mistakes of Dot Com Bubble companies. They have paid special attention to building business models, primarily advertising-based ones. But now that model has come under fire, and a newer model is gaining in popularity: the freemium business model. I want to talk a little about its rise and the future of freemium in online business.

The Woes of Internet Startups

Recently, the problem has not been overexuberance, but the inability of many Internet companies to build sustainable profits. Many social media websites rely on advertising dollars to generate revenue. Advertising is the primary source of income for Google, Digg, Facebook, and almost all blogs. But for a lot of these companies, advertising has not been enough.

An example: the social media powerhouse Digg is still unable to amass a profit after four years. It incurred a loss of nearly $5 million in the first three quarters of 2008. Powerhouse Facebook faces these challenges as well. Its value has plummeted from a $15 billion dollar high to a speculated $3.7 billion because of monetization concerns. And with the economy (and advertising eCPMs) sinking like a boulder in a lake, venture capitalists have ratcheted up the pressure on their companies to turn a profit or shut down.

A great deal of discussion has occurred on social media channels over the best business model for companies in the Internet industry. More and more, companies are turning away from advertising-based business models and turning towards the freemium model. In the freemium model, you offer a free or trial version and a paid, advanced version of your product.
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Creating powerpoints is a task most people tend to dread. Hell, most people don’t like powerpoint slides when they’re viewing a presentation. They are stuffed with boring bullet points, images that add nothing to the presentation, and monotone speakers that knock you out like an Ambien.

This is the wrong way to approach a presentation. This is the wrong way to build a presentation, and this post is intended to help you build a killer presentation utilizing slides that keeps people on their toes and in baited breath for what you’re going to say next.

Using the example presentation below (it’s the slide set I used for my presentation at the Kellogg School of Business), I’m going to outline 12 tips for building unique slides for engaging and successful presentations. And as a side note, if you want to see this type of presentation in action, I will be speaking at the Facebook Developer Garage tomorrow (Feb. 20th) at the headquarters of Where I’ve Been.

The first rule is the most important – YOU are presenting, not the projector. If you put all of your points, thoughts, and statements on the slides, it will become the focus of the audience. Avoid this at all costs You want the audience to focus on you, not the presentation. Notice how I only use sentences when I’m posting quotes – I want people to focus on the sentences coming out of my mouth, not on the screen.

The corollary to rule #1 is to limit the amount of information on slides. You do NOT need to tell the story on the slides. In fact, it should be the opposite. The slides should only be a prompt, an image, a graph, or some other visual cue that either sums up what you’re talking about or is an aid to show information that is hard to digest orally. If a person has to take even 30 seconds to read an entire slide, you’ve lost them for several minutes, because they are not listening to you.
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I’m currently working on a talk I’m giving at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Business. The topic is Internet Entrepreurship in 2009: Where’s the Opportunity? And if you’re in Evanston on Tuesday, Feb 3rd at 12:15, Room 101, I’d love to see you there, at the talk or at some point that day.

I’m not going to give away what I will talk about. What I am going to talk about is one simple way to avoid one of my pet peeves: bad presentations

I talked about this in a previous (and popular) blog post, but the point of today’s article isn’t how to give a presentation, but rather this mindset:

Thank you to all of my friends on your support and congratulations! If you didn’t hear, I finally finished my novel yesterday, and I wanted to share some lessons from the experience.

I decided to do video this time because I need a break from writing (except for Mashable; I will be back on the case very soon)

I’ll have more to report as I try to take this moment in, but I completed my first novel, a science-fiction thriller, at about 11:00.

Although the story’s done, I still have a lot of work to do. I’m going to take a break from it, read some fiction for fun, and then get this thing printed and do my edits. After that, I’ll be asking some close friends to read it as well and we’ll find out if it’s up to par.

In the meantime, here’s some statistics (as of 1/24/2009):

I’m finally done. Wow.

Thank you to everyone who emailed, called, IMed, and tweeted me during my blog’s downtime yesterday. Nobody is quite sure what happened, though people had theories, but in the end I (eventually) got to my hosting and we went back in time and restored the website.

I’m going to be changing a lot of how I manage the blog. There’s going to be restore points because I’m going to use SVN and I will be redesigning the blog. This is a long overdue project I have wanted to undertake, but never had the time. But I anticipate a little more time soon.

Once again, thanks for the help everyone! Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside you all care.

- Ben